Less Europe

Two and a half years ago, Nigel Farage, a member of the European Parliament, chartered a small aircraft to tow a campaign banner for the United Kingdom Independence Party, of which he is the leader. The plane, with Farage aboard, flipped and nose-dived onto a field in Northamptonshire. The accident broke his ribs, sternum, and spine, but not his taste for political mischief. “I survived a bloody crash,” Farage said last week. “I have more vigor and vim and gusto then I ever had before. I’m also an inch shorter.”

This was three days before the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union, the primary victim of that vigor and vim. Farage, perhaps the continent’s fiercest and best-known Euroskeptic, was in Manhattan to attend a reception hosted by a hedge-fund manager from Geneva. The U.K.I.P., a feisty populist right-wing faction founded in 1993 in opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, which created the euro, has traditionally run lean, but Farage had identified the international hedge-fund community as a congenial source of support. The congeniality, on these shores, had been primed by widely circulated YouTube videos of Farage berating his fellow-members of the European Parliament for what he considers the folly of their grand unification project and their undemocratic manner of pursuing it. In one speech, addressing Herman Van Rompuy, the newly chosen (rather than elected) president of the E.U. and former Prime Minister of Belgium (“pretty much a noncountry”), Farage said, “I don’t want to be rude, but, you know, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” Later, pressured to make an apology, Farage offered one—to bank clerks.

Farage, who is forty-eight and worked for two decades as a commodities trader and broker, has the charisma of a taproom duke and the appearance of a mongoose (there’s a Tumblr called Meerkats That Look Like Nigel Farage). He has a smoker’s marbly laugh and tawny skin, and, as he credibly claims, “relatively hollow legs,” into which, at the reception, he poured a fair amount of gin. The gathering, billed as “cocktails and strategy,” was roughly two dozen men and two women in the parlor of an East Side private club. Strategizing was limited, it seemed, to jaunty recalibrations of Mitt Romney’s odds, post-Denver.

After a while, Farage made some remarks. “I’m not really a politician,” he began. “I’m actually a businessman. I supported Margaret Thatcher, I believed in Ronald Reagan, I believe in free markets, I believe in small government, enterprise, hard work, and I believe in a taxation system that doesn’t punish those who do well in life.”

“I’ve heard enough,” a man called out, to great laughter.

But Farage had come not so much to flatter supply-side sympathies as to embroider his contention that the euro is toast. “I’m not anti-European at all. I’m married to a German, for goodness’ sake, so I know the dangers of a German-dominated household.” But, he said, “The idea that we should take all these different countries in Europe, force them together against their democratic will, and put them under the control of people like Herman Van Rompuy is, frankly, beyond belief.

“These are very, very dangerous, bad people,” he went on. “They want to stop nation-state democracy.” The consequence, in his view, will likely be violent revolution and political extremism. (A few days later, after hearing that the E.U. had won the Nobel, he said, “I thought it was a joke. I thought it must be April the 1st. The timing is absolutely bizarre. And, anyway, what has kept the peace in Europe since 1945 is not a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats but, rather, NATO, with no small contribution by the United States.”)

“Did you see Merkel today?” he asked. Angela Merkel had visited Greece, prompting demonstrations and riots. “I mean, how insensitive. Is it any wonder they all turned out wearing swastikas on their arms and giving Nazi salutes? This project, which was supposed to make the countries of Europe love each other, is actually making the countries of Europe hate each other.”

He described a meeting he had with Merkel last year, in which he suggested that everyone would be happier if the Greeks left the euro—the Greeks would be free to default on their debts, re-adopt the drachma, and escape “the economic prison” of the euro zone; and the Germans would no longer have to contemplate bailing them out, in perpetuity. Merkel (who, he said, “outside of the public glare, is a completely different person from the one you see on the TV: she is even more miserable in private”) explained that if the Greeks pulled out, other countries would, too, and that would doom “our European dream.”

“What Merkel is saying,” Farage went on, “is that if the whole of Greece goes bankrupt, if everybody in Greece is starving, if they’re all homeless, that doesn’t matter, we have to preserve our dream. In pursuing something that is clearly a failed economic model, we’re doing just what the Communists did in Soviet Russia.”

The mood had grown sombre. Farage brightened it with a few quips about the new Socialist French President, François Hollande, and then declared, “The gap between Germany and France will grow. My advice to all investors is to be short everything French over the next decade, and you will make money.” Strategy. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.